AMD Shows Off Servers, Notebooks, Other Devices Running on Its Chips

SAN FRANCISCO—On the day before Intel kicked off its annual developer conference, executives from rival Advanced Micro Devices were in a nearby hotel announcing the company's 2014 roadmap for embedded processors, which power everything from in-car technologies to data center systems in such areas as communications infrastructure, networking and storage. At the same time, AMD put on display a range of systems powered by its processors, from servers to notebooks to a virtual reality game. The vendor's presentation touched on what AMD executives say will be the key growth areas for the company, including the embedded space, dense and highly energy-efficient servers, and ultramobile systems. AMD, like several other established vendors, is looking to reduce its dependence on the global PC market, which is continuing to see shrinking sales. By the end of the year, AMD executives expect these new markets to contribute 20 percent of the company's revenues; within a few years, they hope that percentage will be closer to 50 percent. Here is a look at some of the systems AMD had on display.

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AMD Shows Off Servers, Notebooks, Other Devices Running on Its Chips

By Jeffrey Burt

AMD Contributes to the Open Compute Project

This server created by Penguin Computing is powered by AMD's Opteron 6300 Series processors and is based on the Open Compute 3.0 spec. The Open Compute Project was led by Facebook in an effort to encourage the development of dense, power-efficient servers.

AMD's Low-Power SeaMicro Microservers

Microservers—highly dense, power-efficient systems—could become a highly contested segment of the server market. Intel is attacking the space with its Atom platform—most recently the release of "Avoton" (for servers) and "Rangeley" (for networking systems)—while AMD is leveraging its acquisition last year of SeaMicro and also is partnering with ARM. Here is a SeaMicro SM15000 Opteron-based system, which offers up to 64 eight-core chips in a single system.

AMD in HP's Project Moonshot Strategy

Hewlett-Packard is building small, highly efficient server modules in its Moonshot initiative. While the first of the Moonshot servers will be powered by Intel Atom chips, the tech giant will leverage other vendors' chips in future versions, including those from AMD and ARM. This Moonshot cartridge is powered by AMD's "Kyoto" Opteron processors.

AMD Finds Its Way Into HP's Notebooks

HP's Envy 15 TouchSmart notebook is powered by an AMD A8-5550 chip and includes an AMD Radeon HD 8550G graphics card. The display is 15.6 inches.

The Oculus Rift Virtual Reality System

AMD showed off a system powered by its "Kaveri" desktop chip and running a version of Oculus' Rift virtual reality game, which includes a pair of goggles that brings the user into the game. Oculus is not yet selling the game to the public; it's recently been released to some developers, according to AMD officials.

Bringing the Sound to Life With the Corsair Headset

The headset brings the sounds of the game into high definition with Corsair's headset.

GizmoSphere for Developers

Gizmo has released a developer box for developers that is powered by AMD's G-Series embedded accelerated processing unit (APU).

ASRock Uses AMD Embedded Technology

The IMB-A180-H system leverages AMD's G-Series system-on-a-chip (SoC) for embedded systems for its mini-ITX form factor.

Xi13 Uses an AMD Athlon Chip

The small system is powered by a 1.8GHz Athlon 64 chip, offers 2GB of DDR3 memory and 1MB of Level 2 cache, and consumes 20 watts.